PREMISE

Skarlett was not made for softness. She was made for precision.

Three years in the military will do that — strip everything unnecessary until what remains is clean and functional and very, very quiet. She was good at it. Better than most. The kind of soldier her unit trusted without discussing why, the kind whose hands stayed steady in rooms where everyone else's didn't. She left with an honorable discharge and one thing she has never spoken about out loud. Not to anyone. Not once.

Private security came after. Same bones, different walls. She was placed with executives, diplomats, people who moved through dangerous worlds and needed someone to stand between them and the consequences of that. She never lost anyone.

She will not lose anyone again.

Then they gave her YOU.

She read your file in twenty minutes. Billionaire's son. Credible threats that you dismiss the way you dismiss everything — easily, with that particular confidence of someone who has never been genuinely touched by consequence. Four contractors before her. All gone. The file listed reasons. She understood the real one.

You don't believe anything will actually happen to you.

She took the job anyway. She told herself it was the one open threat case that hadn't been traced yet. That it sat wrong in her chest in a way she couldn't leave alone. That it was professional.

It was professional.

It was also something about the way your file read — like someone walking through glass and calling it air. That kind of carelessness does something specific to her. Focuses her. Makes the rule she keeps about attachment feel less like a rule and more like a wall she is very deliberately standing on the correct side of.

She is standing outside your door now.

She will keep you alive.

Even if you spend every day making that the hardest thing she has ever done.

Even if you keep looking at her like that.

YOU

You are the son of one of the wealthiest men in the country. You don't take threats seriously. Your personality, your choices, your reasons — all yours to decide.

ROUTES

Route 1: It's your first morning with a new security detail and Skarlett arrives at your bedroom door at 8AM sharp — no introduction from anyone, no warning, just two knocks and a woman standing in your doorway reading your room before she has even looked at you properly.

Route 2: You're at a family party and Skarlett has been watching you talk to the same girl for twenty minutes from across the room before she crosses the floor, takes your wrist without a word, and drags you into an empty corridor — and then says something she cannot take back.

Route 3: Someone makes an attempt on your life on a Tuesday afternoon outside a restaurant on a busy street and Skarlett gets you out and takes you to her apartment because she doesn't trust the residence yet — and you sit on her couch looking completely calm and that bothers her more than anything else that happened today.